A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

LITERARY CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTMAS EVE

This morning, while I was having my daily lemon poppyseed
muffin and coffee at the Cafe Carolina, I idly glanced through the Arts section
of the TIMES, the Tuesday crossword and Ken Ken puzzles requiring very little
time, as usual.I happened on a story
about John Goldwyn, grandson of the legendary Samuel Goldwyn of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame, who is trying to make a comeback as a movie producer
with the just released The Secret Life of
Walter Mitty.I have seen previews
of the movie, a fifty million dollar spectacular, starring the always egregious
Ben Stiller.My first reaction to the
previews was a silent "Oh, no!That
is all wrong!"

Anyway, the TIMES piece got me thinking about the larger
question of the appropriateness of adaptations and modernizations of classic
literary works.You know the sort of thing I mean:King
Lear set in 1930's Weimar Germany, Romeo
and Juliet as a musical about New York gangs.Sometimes these work exceedingly well.West
Side Story is, for my money, a completely legitimate take on the Shakespeare
play.Sometimes these adaptations are
disasters.Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude
Law as Holmes and Watson are so completely wrong that their version of the great
Conan Doyle characters struck me as a deliberate piece of camp [and a bad piece
at that.]

The problem, as I see it, is this:a great author integrates the characters and
plot lines so perfectly with the social, legal, political, and cultural milieu
in which the story is set that the two cannot be disambiguated.Pride
and Prejudice is set in a world in which property and marriage and family
connection are inseparable.Darcy's
hesitations about marrying a daughter of the Bennett family makes no sense if
the story is transported to 1990's San Francisco.Richard
III is incomprehensible if Richard is figured as a New York corporate
executive.The motivations of the
characters, the constraints on their choices, the tragedy of their situation
are all inseparable from the social world they inhabit.

Now, The Secret Life
of Walter Mitty is a delightful James Thurber short story about a meek
little man -- a Casper Milquetoast, if I may show my age -- who carves out a
tiny interior space in his imagination into which he can retreat from his
overbearing wife [A Thurber standard] for fleeting moments of satisfying
fantasy.One of his little flights of
fancy, for example, takes place in the brief time that he sits in his car at a
traffic light, waiting for the red to turn to green.To render this fiction cinematically by a series
of dramatic, expensive special effects episodes completely loses the charm of
the original story [you will notice that I say this confidently despite having
not seen the picture.]As for the
casting of Ben Stiller, words fail me.Walter Mitty is not a mugging self-referential clown.Far from it.Kevin Kline might be able to carry it off, but not Ben Stiller.

If I may recur to Aristotle -- always a permissible move for
a philosopher -- the great writers succeed in finding the universal in the
particular.They do not write the
universal and then arbitrarily set it in some particular to which it bears no
intrinsic relation.

Very much the same thing is true of great composers, I
believe [although here I suspect I will get a strong argument from some
performers as well as from some composers.]The original pianoforte [soft-loud
-- rather like the pushmepullyou in Dr. Doolittle] is very different from the
modern concert grand.It makes a
different sound.When Mozart wrote for
the pianoforte -- I am convinced --
he did not write for some ideal perfect piano which, alas for him, the
available pianoforte only imperfectly
instantiated.He wrote for the existing
instrument.Had someone made a modern
concert grand available to him, mirabile
dictu, he would have written different music.That is why not even the immortal Glenn Gould
was able, on a piano, to play harpsichord music as it was meant to be played.

Well, as I say, I have not seen the movie.I am still trying to find the time to see The desolation of Smaug.

The point about Mozart writing for the piano he had is quite right: indeed you don't go far enough! For there is no such thing as a perfect piano sound. Modern pianos are easier to play and more reliable than earlier pianos, and perhaps more versatile; but the sound is just different, not better. (And in fact, some people think it's worse: listen to the Faust/van der Zwaart/Melkinov recording of Brahms' Horn Trio on period instruments: the rickety old piano has a human life a modern grand just can't have: it's too refined, you can't push it to its mechanical limits.)

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.